FLASH: Is internet design with Flash possible? ;-)

[Robert Warnke]

Hi Len,


: You say you are going to teach a class on Flash. Why? Because you

: think you

: can and someone pay will you to do it or because you got drafted by your

: department to do so? I'm not knocking that, we all have to eat. But if you

: want to provide value to your students and your employer, you need to

: understand the rationale for Flash. From what you've written, you

: don't see

: that. You define interactivity as pressing a button and getting someplace

: instantly. If I understand you correctly, you want the

: "information" to pop

: up on the screen without any intervening animation. You don't

: want to see it

: slide into place, come in from a distance, or appear gradually through an

: alpha fade. You seem to see Flash as primarily a UI tool or else

: you simply

: don't like the UI's developed by Flash designers.


I teach internet stuff like HTML, JavaScript, VRML...

Next week I 'll teach Flash and I compare it with internet standards. Some

function are great but if you use there wrong than you 'll annoy the user.


: >From your perspective Flash is ridiculous though you haven't said that.

: Plain HTML is more effective for interaction as you define it. But that

: isn't the point of Flash. Flash *is* an animation tool. Animation

: has value

: for many people. Look at the perennial popularity of cartoons. Look at the

: transition effects incorporated into even essentially static presentation

: tools like Powerpoint. Look at the effort that went into the

: development of

: animated gifs and dhtml. Flash provides all this within a scriptable

: interactive framework. That's its value, not the ability to jump from one

: piece of static information to another.


I agree with you if you mean animation like an cartoon or a presentation.

But I mean interaction! The user is here the king and not a overbearing

designer. A interaction mustn't in the internet have time delay! But see the

bad examples on the Macromedia side. However this HTML-Code make me

laughing.

Maybe my words are a bit to hard but some Flash examples are impolite.


: People are fascinated by things which move on a screen. I don't know why.

: Maybe it's biological. Static images are scenery. Things that move are

: potentially threat or food.


But no all people like this. Last week I taught the first steps in the

internet. And a women ask me: "Oh, why must here everything shake? I can't

read the text!" She means animated gifs. Fortunately now there are some

tools to stop animated gifs (MS-Explorer 4 can switch off the animation) and

banner advertising. I think the user has to decide what he would like to

use. Maybe there will be tools to switch off the Flash-Player next. The

issue is not Flash. It is bad design.


: I demoed a relatively simple Flash animation showing a product

: overview and

: a piece of a tutorial to 50 staid IT professionals last Tuesday at the end

: of an day-long product preview. I was the only presenter all day whose

: presentation was applauded. The next day I had VPs beating a path to my

: cubie saying we had to have more of this stuff. It was exactly what we

: needed to make our products come alive for our customers. I know very well

: what I would have gotten from demonstrating a set of static html pages

: instead, even though they would have conveyed much more hard information

: about the products and their use and could be built in a tenth

: the time. Do

: that, though, and I would have gotten yawns from my audience and

: more likely

: a pink slip than a vp visitation.


Please see the difference between your audience and the internet user. The

problem is the payer of the internet sides are different to the surfers they

are looking for information in the internet. The internet sides of big firms

are often bad and with faults. The hits are very little. But the price was

very high :-). Maybe in Germany it is a bigger problem than in the USA.




Robert Warnke

Berlin (Germany)

http://rowa.giso.de





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